Medicine

Volume Number: 3

Issue Number: 10

Column Tag: C Workshop

Using Regions in Medicine with C

By Stephen Dubin, V.M.D., Ph.D., Thomas W. Moore, Ph.D., and, Sheel

Kishore, M.S., Drexel University

Fun with Regions: Part I, High Level Language Implementation

As one looks through a tattered and tear-stained copy of Inside Macintosh, there

is little that would be considered colorful or dramatic language. The following

statement, from the section on Quickdraw, stands out: “Quickdraw has the unique and

amazing ability to gather an arbitrary set of spatially coherent points into a structure

called a region, and perform complex yet rapid manipulations and calculations on such

structures. This remarkable feature not only will make your standard programs

simpler and faster, but will let you perform operations that would otherwise be nearly

impossible; ...”

One of the authors read this at the very time that he wanted to do something

nearly impossible. The job at hand was a medical instructional program,

“Burnsheet”, in which the outline of a thermal injury is drawn on a standard

silhouette of the body (fig 1.). Since many formulas for treating burn patients depend

Referenced by (11):